To summarize: HFOSS is an organization that helps get students (and hopefully, soon, others) involved in FOSS projects that have humanitarian goals/benefit society in some way.
If you're looking for major, well-established projects, we've worked with the Gnome Accessibility Project, OpenMRS, Sahana, and a few others I'm forgetting right now.
We also have some projects we've started that are primarily student-run at the moment: POSIT (posit.hfoss.org -- Android app for mobile search and identification) and Collabbit (collabbit.org -- RoR webapp for emergency management).
I'm not sure what capacity right now the various projects we're involved in have for taking on new members, but I'd be glad to put you in touch with people you can ask.
I was an HFOSS summer intern this past summer, and I'm now on the steering committee. Feel free to get in touch (e-mail is in my profile) if you're interested or have questions.
As a writer who sometimes covers tech startups, I can also add that it helps to get in touch before an event or official news release happens. It can sometimes take a while before a story gets ok'd by the editors.
I'm starting on Monday as an intern/reporter at a well established international (print and web) science magazine and am wrestling with these questions right now. I'd love to try (or at least promote) some crazy ideas, if any body has any suggestions.
I think, for example, that magazines should also be (web) tv channels. Vaynerchuk's wine library seems like an interesting model, I wonder, can it work for science?
Also, are there any podcasts that are economically viable?
Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated; DM me at Twitter if you want to get in touch (@mainsequence)
I keep hoping that following a certain level of technological sophistication, and in absence of further sophistication as to make your corporeal body wholly unnecessary that having no possessions and no permanent residence will be seen as normal. What could you need but the clothes on your back, the shoes on your feet, and the terminal implanted in your head?
People will probably still have sentimental attachements to souveniers. But apart from that, you may be right --- taking the current the lifestyle of some rich people as an indicator.
Of course we'd have to dramatically lower the transaction costs for short term rents of various goods that you may want to us.
1. I actually started work on an uber-twitter feed for all our members (we've almost reached our first 1,000 registered users). It seemed like a fun idea, but what's the use case? What made you suggest it?
2. In all honesty, I have very little prior personal knowledge of Chicago and few, if any personal connections here in the city. I'd certainly do a lot better if I had family here and knew lots of folks, but I'm getting by. In the last month I've started meeting with local media who are seeing what we're up and wanting to get on board with our voting buttons on their sites.
3. Nope. In fact, everyone I pitched this idea to told me it was awful, including Kevin Rose himself. I'm doing it anyway. Like I said, this is far from a success, but it's growing and people who find us are signing up and getting involved.
Does this open up room for content-providers in other silos to expand into the TV space? For example, magazines. Wired tried to start a science series on PBS a couple years ago and it flopped. Could it work as an online-only thing?
I'm not a student at the Media Lab, but I do go to MIT and have some friends there. From what I have seen, it helps to have some good artsy-techy projects under your belt.
I don't think they require the GRE to get in, and I'm not sure how important grades are if you've done some interesting projects. I think they want some form of "accomplishment" combined with decent coding skills.
Admission is to specific research groups, so I'd look at the site, find a group doing work that interests you and contact the professor or some of the researchers in the group. Can't hurt to ask them what makes a strong candidate.
Get small fast, hire hackers, leverage your position as a middle-man between a local audience and local businesses online, and capitalize on the decades of valuable content sitting in your archives. Forget breaking news in print, focus on investigative stories that no one else is going to do but some will pay for. Reduce your publishing cycle to one or two times a week. Adopt a "can't beat 'em, join 'em" mentality when it comes to Craigslist and other local competitors. Launch your own local self-serve ad network. Map your area to an insane depth and resell that content to local businesses and utilities. Watch what Google is doing with Google Local and Street View, mimic and surpass.
All of this is possible, but the change is so dramatic that most newspapers will not do it or will go into shock and instead of focusing on long-term recovery will destroy the one asset they have (a local audience) by adopting fast-money tactics (obnoxious banners and spammy marketing).
Basic math and science literacy for a large percentage of people (in the US at least, but I suspect many other places as well).
The pipeline from childhood to the ability to make something people want.
Access to the opportunity to gain economically valuable skills for those who happen to be born in poor families, neighborhoods, cities, countries.